We are excited to announce that in the coming weeks we're expanding the availability of Power BI and Excel connected features such as PivotTables from Power BI datasets and Organization data types to Power BI free license users. This helps organizations who use Power BI Premium to easily distribute authoritative datasets broadly with their users via Excel.
Previously, accessing Power BI data directly from Excel (Desktop or Web) required a Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) license.
Now users who have a Power BI free license can connect from Excel to datasets hosted in a Power BI Premium workspace. These users can now:
- Build PivotTables connected to Power BI datasets, including certified and promoted datasets, from the Data ribbon in Excel
- Lookup and refresh values in Power BI datatypes from the Data Types gallery.
If users have published datasets to their "My workspace", they can also connect to these datasets from Excel.
To connect to a dataset, users must also have build permissions to the dataset.
These changes will roll-out in phases over the coming days and eligible Office Current Channel users with a Power BI free license will have access to Power BI and Excel features over the coming weeks.
Check out the Excel blog for additional information on these changes and Office licensing requirements.
Next steps
Learn more about Power BI licensing
Licensing the Power BI service for users in your organization
